Leading travel platforms profit from tours of ethnically cleansed Karabakh

Major global travel platforms are profiting from Azerbaijani government-sanctioned tours to Nagorno-Karabakh, a region that was ethnically cleansed just two years ago.

Among those offering trips to “Khankendi, Azerbaijan,” the city long known as Stepanakert and capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, are GetYourGuide, the Berlin-based tourist booking service; Tripadvisor, the U.S.-based world’s largest travel guidance platform, along with its subsidiary Viator; and the full service online travel agency Expedia, also based in the United States. 

In September 2023, Azerbaijani forces seized the region in a military offensive following a brutal nine-month blockade that left its Armenian population facing severe shortages of food and medicine. The offensive left at least 200 Armenians dead and 130 wounded, including civilians. 

The attacks triggered the mass exodus of the remaining 100,000 Armenian residents, setting off a chaotic cascade of events which included the explosion of a fuel depot that killed at least 218 people. A further estimated 70 people, mostly the elderly, died during the arduous journey to safety in Armenia. The European Parliament and other international bodies have characterized the events as ethnic cleansing. 

A deceptive narrative

GetYourGuide, for example, currently lists at least seven Karabakh itineraries operated by Azerbaijan-based tour groups, including Azerbaijan Trip Adventures, Baku Heritage Travel, EcoSky Travel, and Smile Azerbaijan Tour. The other travel platforms each offer one or two of the same tours available through GetYourGuide.

Descriptions and itineraries across listings are strikingly similar, suggesting central planning. They almost all have the same exact stops, none of which referencing the sites’ Armenian heritage. For example, itineraries from four out of the six companies all boast of the “breathtaking views from the Jidir Duzu plateau”. 

Insiduously, EcoSky highlights the chance for guests to see “reconstruction areas” in Stepanakert, a term that in practice refers to the large-scale destruction of Armenian homes and neighborhoods, an ongoing process which ensures that the refugees have no homes to return to. 

One tour invites visitors to see an “Albanian Church” near Aghdara (Martakert), referring to the medieval Armenian monastery of Gandzasar Monastery. This reflects a well-known Azerbaijani state narrative that rebrands Armenian cultural sites as medieval Caucasian Albanian, an interpretation rooted in a widely discredited theory and promoted under President Ilham Aliyev to obscure the Armenian identity of these monuments.

Elsewhere, cultural heritage has been destroyed outright. The Kanach Zham Church in Shushi, for example, was demolished in 2024, as confirmed by satellite analysis from the Cornell-based research initiative Caucasus Heritage Watch. With independent access barred, including to organizations like UNESCO, such remote monitoring remains the only possible method for documenting and studying the region’s endangered heritage.

While international organizations have been unable to access Karabakh, the tightly controlled and highly regimented tours can provide visitors with a limited opportunity to observe and document conditions on the ground, if they know what to look for. A video released last month by YouTuber YoungMin Skies made waves for the rare and unfiltered look he gave through one such Nagorno-Karabakh propaganda tour. 

Unable to travel independently due to government restrictions, he joined a group tour operated by Baku Heritage Tours which is also currently listed on GetYourGuide and Viator. 

YoungMin’s experience indicates that on the inside, these tightly-controlled tours present heavily biased narratives that appear to violate  the guidelines of the platforms that promote them. For instance, GetYourGuide prohibits exploitative practices and requires that tours linked to human rights abuses or humanitarian crises be “neutral and educational.” 

Similarly, Viator requires that “visits do not disrupt residents or exploit recent tragedies.” 

“The only mention of Armenians by the tour guide contained negative connotations,” YoungMin comments in the video, describing how they were referred to as “illegal squatters.” 

At the site of the former Nagorno-Karabakh parliament building, the guide boasted of its recent demolition by the government. Requests from the guests to visit Armenian landmarks, including the cathedral in Stepanakert, were repeatedly denied, and the guide avoided even driving past it. 

One of the few remaining landmarks in Stepanakert still accessible to visitors is the Tatik-Papik (“We Are Our Mountains”) Monument, a well-known monument created in the 1960s by the Armenian sculptor Sargis Baghdasaryan. YoungMin’s footage allows for a rare close-up of the monument, showing Azerbaijani graffiti carved directly into the stone. 

YoungMin sums up his experience in the region as “eerie, desolate and surreal,” noting the widespread presence of empty homes and abandoned neighborhoods due to the ethnic cleansing campaign. 

An ethical blind spot 

CivilNet reached out to all four of the travel platforms asking if their tours to Nagorno-Karabakh align with their ethical standards. A GetYourGuide representative told CivilNet that the issue would be investigated, however further response was never provided despite repeated follow-ups over a two-month period.  

None of the other sites responded to CivilNet’s inquiry. 

This lack of transparency is particularly concerning given the broader context. The strict government permitting requirements and limited freedom of movement mean the online travel platforms are promoting an experience controlled by the same authorities responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the region. As a result, these tours appear less like legitimate site-seeing and more like a government’s efforts to justify and normalize its actions. 

This would be consistent with wider assessments of Azerbaijan’s record on free speech and human rights. In the Freedom House 2026 Freedom in the World index, Azerbaijan scored just 6 out of 100, ranking below Taliban-ruled Afghanistan (8), Iran (10), and Russia (12). Even more striking, when Azerbaijani-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh was last assessed in 2024, it received a score of -3, lower than any other territory evaluated, including North Korea.